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Commercial Capital and British Development: A Reply to Michael Barratt Brown
“Despite their overtly historical nature, Anderson and Nairn’s essays on British development were profoundly theoretical. The identification of British ‘peculiarity’ or ‘exceptionalism’ involved a challenge not only to Marx and Engels’s commentaries on the times in which they lived, but also to the general Marxist theory of capitalist . . .” read more
Mothers in the Fatherland
“In spring 1987, a political document caused a stir in the Federal Republic of Germany: the Mothers’ Manifesto produced by a section of women in the Green Party. Some passed on to the business of the day with a feeling of kindly satisfaction—there was no longer much to . . .” read more
The Silences of David Lodge
“The success of the ‘campus’ novel in England is not hard to account for. Ever since Burke and Coleridge’s testy polemics against the Jacobins, the English attitude to the intelligentsia has been one of profound ambivalence. Intellectuals are seen as faintly sinister figures, bohemian and nonconformist, treasonable clerks . . .” read more
Historical Materialism, Historical Sociology
“Michael Mann has recently published a large book on the history of power which few historians or sociologists can afford to ignore. Its 549 pages are only the first volume out of three; Mann’s aim will at the end be a massive retheorization of the sociology of power, . . .” read more
Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Marxism
“Mai Ghoussoub’s ‘Feminism—or the Eternal Masculine—in the Arab World’ (nlr 161) is indicative of two fundamental problems plaguing radical analysis of the Middle East: the extent to which it is legitimate for Marxists to throw out their analytical categories and resort to Weberian notions of a ‘collective . . .” read more
Perestroika: The Dialectic of Change
“To Western observers, Soviet society at the end of the 1970s seemed hopelessly conservative and arguments over the ‘unreformability of Communism’ became commonplace among dissidents and the liberal intellectuals who sympathized with them. Pessimism reigned even among official experts, many of whom, on their own admissiom, ‘had fallen . . .” read more
Cacique Democracy and the Philippines: Origins and Dreams
“About this time last year, President Corazon Aquino told a most instructive lie. Addressing the Filipino-Chinese Federated Chambers of Commerce on 9 March 1987, she described her appearance before them as a ‘homecoming,’ since her great-grandfather had been a poor immigrant from southeast China’s Fukien province. Doubtless her . . .” read more
The Myth of Market Socialism
“We must be grateful to Alec Nove for keeping the controversy to the essentials, avoiding red herrings and side issues. Our debate does not concern the most adequate strategy for assuring immediate rapid economic growth and increasing social equality in relatively less developed countries. Neither is its object . . .” read more
The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling Foundations?
“It is now virtually a commonplace among left observers and activists that we have recently witnessed the emergence of a New International Division of Labour and the Globalization of Production. For many, these twin tendencies manifest such deep structural transformations in the world economy that group or government . . .” read more
Raymond Williams and the Politics of a New Left
“The death of Raymond Williams on January 26th robs the left in Britain of its most authoritative, consistent and radical voice. His loss is the more difficult to bear in that it was unexpected and came when he was at the height of his powers. Tributes to Williams . . .” read more
Feminist Politics in Japan
“The situation of women in Japan, perhaps the most advanced capitalist nation today, raises a number of issues that will seem at once familiar and highly distinctive to an international readership. What is the role of women’s labour, and how have capital and the state attempted to regulate . . .” read more
Away With All the Great Arches: Anderson’s History of British Capitalism
“The golden age of British History is now over, according to David Cannadine, not only as a nation but also as a subject of study—‘an account of the British past which reconciled repeated revolutions with a belief in ordered progress and which thus appeared to be simultaneously unique . . .” read more
Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination
“We Brazilians and other Latin Americans constantly experience the artificial, inauthentic and imitative nature of our cultural life. An essential element in our critical thought since independence, it has been variously interpreted from romantic, naturalist, modernist, right-wing, left-wing, cosmopolitan and nationalist points of view, so we may suppose . . .” read more
Women’s Rights and Catholicism in Ireland
“To judge by results in legislation and social progress, one might well think that Ireland has never had a Women’s Liberation Movement. It is true that in theory women now have equal pay and equal entitlements under social welfare, and that children’s allowances are paid directly to mothers. . . .” read more
Socialism or Anti-Imperialism? The Left and Revolution in Iran
“A spectre is haunting the Iranian Left—the assembled ghosts of orthodox Communism, Maoism and populism. Together these had converged, on the eve of the Revolution, to construct a Third Worldist discourse and practice that stressed the evils of dependent capitalism and imperialism. Agribusiness, transnational corporations, military expenditures, the . . .” read more
The Iranian Revolution and Its Implications
“In late 1978, just prior to the fall of the Pahlavi regime, you published your book Iran: Dictatorship and Development. Much has happened since then to challenge and modify your analysis. How would you assess subsequent political and economic developments in Iran?” read more
Post-Marxism Without Apologies
“Why should we rethink the socialist project today? In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy we pointed out some of the reasons. As participating actors in the history of our time, if we are actually to assume an interventionist role and not to do so blindly, we must attempt to . . .” read more
Conservatives and Corporatism
“In the course of her closing speech at the Conservative Party Conference in 1984 Mrs Thatcher held high a copy of the 1944 White Paper on employment policy and triumphantly revealed that it carried on its cover the name of Margaret H. Roberts. While it may be intriguing . . .” read more
Labour in the Great City
“The giant city was a new phenomenon in Western capitalism, and a type of human settlement virtually unprecedented in the non-oriental world before the eighteenth century: that is to say, the city whose population was measured in several hundreds of thousands, and very soon in millions. Until the . . .” read more
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy
“The policies of Sweden’s Social Democratic Government are often invoked to demonstrate that there exists a viable alternative to Thatcherite neo-liberalism, while for many currents within Europe’s dwindling group of ruling Socialist parties Sweden has come to represent the light beckoning at the end of a long tunnel . . .” read more
The Workers' Party in Brazil
“The birth of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—pt) has been a singular event of the eighties, not just in Brazil or even in Latin America as a whole. For it is a striking fact that very few new working-class parties have been founded anywhere in the . . .” read more
A Labour Process to Nowhere?
“What has come to be known over the last ten years or so as ‘the labour process debate’ has been, literally, very much an academic exercise. And now its academic participants are pronouncing its end: ‘It is not perhaps an exaggeration to claim that the labour process bandwagon . . .” read more
Ownership, Control and the Market
“For many years capitalism was defined in terms of two key elements: private ownership of the means of production, and the existence of wage labour. These conditions gave rise to the existence of surplus value, which, in the hands of capitalists, became capital. From this sprang a definition . . .” read more
The Intelligentsia and the Changes
“When, in the spring of 1985, the third ceremonial funeral in three years took place in Moscow, most of the intelligentsia were in a state of apathy and pessimism. This was due, not to regret for the passing of the cpsu general secretary, Konstantin Chernenko, but to . . .” read more
Tomas Borge on the Nicaraguan Revolution
“The questions I want to ask basically concern the originality of the Nicaraguan revolution, which is very different from the Cuban revolution but in ways that are not altogether clear. We know that you don’t use the word socialism but the word Sandinism, but we don’t know . . .” read more
Class Politics and Radical Democracy
“Ellen Meiksins Wood’s recent book, The Retreat From Class, is a formidable and trenchant attack upon the arguments of what she calls the New True Socialists. Marx applied the label ‘True Socialists’ to those he accused of having fallen victim to the illusion that socialism was ‘a question . . .” read more
The Contradictions of Greek Socialism
“The victory of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (pasok) in the Greek elections of 1981, a mere seven years after the party’s foundation, was perhaps the most dramatic breakthrough in the political recomposition of Southern Europe in the late seventies and early eighties. Its 48 per cent share . . .” read more
Post-Marxism?
“Times change and people change. Their ideas change; develop, progress—and regress. There can be gradual change within a more or less stable intellectual framework. And there can also be sharper breaks, mutations of outlook in which one thing is renounced and another embraced. But each person has to . . .” read more
The PCI and the Historic Compromise
“Few on the left will disagree with the view that the turn taken by events in Italy in recent years is deeply depressing. Capitalism is unquestionably more stable today than at any time since the boom years of the late 1950s, and the social and cultural upheavals of . . .” read more
After the West German Elections
“The political earthquake once widely predicted for the West German federal elections failed to take place on 25 January 1987. Six months earlier, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the centre–right coalition had barely managed to scrape home in the Lower Saxony elections, just thirty thousand votes ahead of . . .” read more
War of the Worlds?
“A ‘Tolkien view of the world’, an image of two empires alone on the map ‘engaged in a global military, economic and ideological struggle for control over all the rest of the world’, seems to reign supreme in the West. On the political Right this view is deliberately . . .” read more
Mario Vargas Llosa: Parables and Deceits
“Some time ago I urged a friend from Lima to read Vargas Llosa’s Historia de Mayta—clumsily entitled The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta in the English edition—so that he might give me an insider’s opinion of the book’s treatment of the Peruvian revolutionary left over the last thirty . . .” read more
The Roots and Contradictions of Modern Militarism
“I define militarism as a set of attitudes and social practices which regards war and the preparation for war as a normal and desirable social activity. This is a broader definition than is common among scholars. It qualifies people other than John Wayne as militarists. But in an . . .” read more
South Africa: The Question of Strategy
“In June 1976 the students of Soweto forced South Africa back onto the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Subsequently there has been a certain ebb and flow to the resistance in that country, but such has been the growth and consolidation of the forces pressing for change . . .” read more
Municipal Enterprise and Popular Planning
“The appearance of a series of major reviews of the Greater London Council’s London Industrial Strategy (lis) in socialist publications, notably Mike Rustin’s thoughtful article in nlr 155, reflects its impact on the wider debate among socialists about strategies to confront the economic crisis. But socialist . . .” read more
The Indian Left
“The record of the major formations of the Indian Left is contradictory in the extreme. Alone in the capitalist world, the two Communist parties (cpi and cpm) have had lengthy experience of administering semi-autonomous regions, while their respective trade union federations have played a major role . . .” read more
The Wages of Virtue
“Sexual harassment of a direct kind, with attempted rape merging into matrimonial intent, has always been with us, as the image of a caveman hauling a cavewoman off by her hair shows. The Greek myths are full of lustful gods pursuing mortal maidens, with a wide variety of . . .” read more
The PCI Congress
“The 17th Congress of the Italian Communist Party was held in Florence between 9 and 13 April, in the midst of Reagan’s first round of sabre-rattling against Libya and his authorization of a new nuclear test in Nevada. Since, as we shall see, the main peculiarity of the . . .” read more
The Dollar Weapon: From Nixon to Reagan
“us international economic policy since the beginning of the seventies can only be explained as a reaction to the relative decline of the American economy vis-à-vis Western Europe and Japan. There is already an ample literature on the decline in us economic power, which is . . .” read more
The Women’s Movement in Greece
“Although feminism, like democracy or socialism, appeals to a universalistic solidarity—born, in this case, of resistance to common experiences of patriarchal and capitalist inequality—the character of particular women’s movements is still shaped by profoundly national contexts of history and socio-economic progress. The uneven trajectories of contemporary capitalist development, . . .” read more
Eco-Socialist Transition on the Threshold of the 21st Century
“It has become difficult to speak about socialism without some words of explanation. What are we talking about? How are we to justify our theses? I take it as an established result of much theoretical debate that socialism is not a state of affairs (that is, neither a . . .” read more
The Uses of Cultural Theory
“For a year or so I have been wanting to say something relatively formal about cultural theory, and this seems to be an occasion. The point is not, at least initially, one of proposition or amendment within this or that theory of culture, but rather a reconsideration of . . .” read more
Restructuring the State
“This article contrasts two strategic options for the Labour Party and the Left in the approach to the next election in Britain. One, the option chosen by the Labour leadership, is to seek to recapture the votes lost to the Alliance parties since 1981 by occupying their political . . .” read more
Proportional Representation: A Socialist Concept
“I submit that proportional representation is a fundamental socialist concept. I argue, furthermore, that no socialist seriously committed to democratic, accountable representation can advocate any other electoral system. My argument, however, is completely different from that put by the sdp/Liberal Alliance. When we look back across the . . .” read more
International Communism in the Heyday of Stalin
“Serious scholarship on the history of Communist Parties has been experiencing a major upswing. Literature was never exactly in short supply. But its value was invariably vitiated by the ingenuousness of its bias, in which the official apologetics of the Communist Parties’ own accounts was matched by the . . .” read more
Resurgent Democracy: Threat and Promise
“In ‘ “Resurgent Democracy”: Rhetoric and Reality’, nlr 154, Edward Herman and James Petras condemn us support for new democracies in South and Central America as hypocritical and opportunist. They also point out the wilful confusion involved in deliberately associating genuine democratization in South America with a . . .” read more
Beyond the Boundary Question
“Class politics, once the unquestioned centre of the socialist project, has became the object of intense controversy. There have been many reasons for this startling development—the appearance of the so-called new social movements and the continued failure of traditional Left parties to effect fundamental social change are just . . .” read more
The Role of the Individual in History: The Case of World War Two
“The primacy of the relationships and conflicts between social forces in determining the course of history is one of the fundamental assumptions of historical materialism. In societies divided into different social classes, such relationships are perforce class relations. History is thus explained, in the final analysis, as a . . .” read more